Wireless local area networks (WLANs) permit great mobility of various communication devices in a local environment. Radio frequency signals used in WLAN devices penetrate floors and walls. A user with a wireless device may travel throughout a building, up, down, or laterally, and still remain connected to the WLAN. This frees the user to conduct parallel activities while staying in contact with the WLAN. For instance, the user may retrieve a document or other item while remaining in communication with co-workers on different floors.
There is a great variety of wireless communication devices for connecting to a WLAN. Different wireless devices contain different features and capabilities. They are further limited to a particular wireless standard, such as the BLUETOOTH wireless standard, IEEE 802.11, and Home RF, and even to a particular version of the wireless standard. A number of these wireless communications devices are managed by multiple processors.
Even with the great variety of wireless devices available, there are still areas where the capabilities of these devices are less than ideal.
First, power conservation management has not been adequate in current devices. Portable wireless devices contain batteries which need to be recharged periodically. Increasingly diverse tasks performed by processors within the portable wireless devices consume varying amounts of power. Current wireless devices do not efficiently allocate energy resources so as to maximize the time before the batteries have to be recharged.
Second, configurability of processing is limited in current wireless devices. For instance, wireless devices may utilize two (or more) processors with a framer. These processors may be disposed together with the framer in the same housing or separately from the framer. A drawback to these current wireless devices is that the processors have unchangeable configurations. This prevents switching between different wireless standards, upgrading to a newer version of the wireless standard, and modifying the processor configuration to correct for errors or otherwise improve performance, such as by better balancing signal paths.
Third, current wireless devices lack adequate self-testing. Current testing of wireless devices is cumbersome because a second wireless device is required to perform device testing. A second wireless device for testing may not be available when needed. Wireless devices need to be checked for operational characteristics not only during manufacture, but also in the field. This need becomes greater for those devices that travel from a warmer environment to a cooler one or from a dry environment to a more humid one. For instance, the user may enter a refrigerated room or a clean room or may venture from inside a builder to outside a building and find that the wireless device he or she is carrying does not function as well because of device environmental sensitivity.
Fourth, synchronization between the different component parts of a wireless device has been limited. Superior device performance occurs when the components of the device are well synchronized. Although current wireless devices do synchronize component operations to a limited extent, the level of synchronization is not adequate for increasingly higher processing within the wireless device.
Fifth, certain wireless device applications require heightened reliability for work in severe, hazardous, or isolated environments. Current wireless communications devices, even those managed by multiple processors, are not built with the redundancy for extremely reliable wireless communications. Extreme working environments demand highly reliable devices. For example, a user may need to carry a wireless communications device into a work space having a caustic atmosphere such as a chemical processing plant or around the cooling system of a nuclear reactor. In such circumstances, it may be imperative to have an extremely reliable communications device to ensure contemporaneous and immediate analysis of imminent dangers.
Consequently, there is a need for dual processor framers in which at least one of the processors is programmable to allow for reconfiguration, those in which the wireless device provides adequate self-testing, those in which internal synchronization of the framer is tightly controlled, and/or those which require a very high degree of reliable operation. Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a solution that addresses deficiencies in the conventional devices.